Cooling your Access Point?

CmdrChillupa asks: "Summer's here in the US. I don't really mind the heat and I've lived my whole life without AC. Just gotten used to having fresh air instead of pre-processed. There's only one problem with this whole theory. After a long day at work I get home and go to do a little surfing on my PowerBook and my WLAN is down. I have a Siemens Speedstream 2624 Wireless Router that from all appearances dislikes the heat more than I do. I've gotten into a habit of holding it in front of a fan for a few minutes everyday when I get home, I thought the fridge might be a bit too humid for it's electronics. Anybody have any solutions aside from a alum-alloy-peltier-inter-cooled-turbo-charged-9 monstrosity?"

Comments

Same as SMC

[ralphb]

I believe that the Siemens Speedstream is hardware equivalent of the SMC AWBR wireless router I have. Siemans runs their own version of firmware on it, and it's supposedly a lot more stable than SMC's firmware. The SMC firmware is so bad, in fact, that I gave up on the SMC as a router because it kept disconnecting my cable modem connection every few hours and required a reboot to reconnect. Not a Hardware problem, they swapped it out for me once. I got myself a Linksys (which runs perfectly) and I'm using the SMC as just a wireless access point. I just disable DHCP and assign it a static IP. Anyway...

The unit is very heat sensitive. When I first installed it, I had trouble getting a stable connection about 30 feet away through one floor and one wall. So, I set the unit up on styrofoam feet about one inch high and set up a 4" cooling fan to blow across the unit. Big difference! The signal in my kitchen is now five by five. I don't think you need to do any extreme cooling tricks to get the improvement.

Ralph

Re:Same as SMC

[drlock]

As the parent post suggests, circulation may be the biggest requirement.

You don't necessarily need cold air from A/C, you just need to keep the air moving.

As an extreme example, I saw a monitor overheat and destroy itself once because someone left a few magazines on top of it and covered the vents. It was not a particularly warm day, there was just no circulation.

Re:Same as SMC

[Laplace]

I agree. happend to my brother.

You left some magazines on your brother and he overheated?

If you need reliable cooling...

[mnmn]

I read someone had done this for his desktop pc..

Take a long flat piece of aluminium bar. Bolt one end into the inside of the AP possibly on top of the hottest chips (will need to drill a hole or slot in the side) and the other end of the bar is bolted on a water pipeline or metal structure of the building that runs through the concrete. This makes your router VERY immobile.

I'm betting youll find an easier way like placing the router in a cooler place, but I just needed to throw in this possibility.

Vertical PCB

[redelm]

Mount the unit so the circuit board is vertical. This will greatly improve cooling by natural convection.

Make sure there is enough vent area at the bottom and top of the case as mounted. Drill some if needed.

Re:Vertical PCB

[adolf]

I'll second that.

I used to use a nice SMC-branded rackmount 10/100 "switching hub." Fan-cooled, 12 ports, looked and felt solid. Recently, it met its fate: it's internal power supply caught fire (!).

So, I needed a replacement. And I'm broke. So I found a cheap (less than $30) 8-port 10/100 switch, branded Hawking Technology and made by who-knows-who. It works as well as any other cheap switch, which is to say: just fine for me here at home.

It ran quite hot while sitting horizontally on a shelf. My newly-discovered fear for warm networking gear told me to fix that.

So, I hung it vertically from the side of the same shelf, using the wall-mount holes on the back and some cable ties. The 8 RJ45 jacks on the bottom allow plenty of air to go past/through them, which escapes out of the small vent near the top of the unit.

It's not quite cool to the touch, but the surface of it is now within "just-barely-warm" range. Which I consider quite good enough.

Passive convection cooling and is underappreciated in the electronics design world by apparently everyone but audio companies and Apple Computer. It wouldn't be hard, at all, to make this thing cool itself acceptably in the horizontal position, but nobody took the time.

refrigerator humidity

[menscher]

Any reason you think the fridge will be humid? Everyone knows that air-conditioning removes humidity... and a fridge is just a big air conditioner. The hard part will be getting wires into the fridge for power/networking. Also, I'm not sure the wireless will work so well from within a fridge (think of shielding effects).

In the fridge

[Tintivilus]

I thought the fridge might be a bit too humid for it's electronics.

If it's too humid in the fridge, it's waaay too humid in the heat. Cold air doesn't hold as much moisture as warm air; this is why a lot of people store ground coffee in the fridge or freezer. You can put it in the fridge without any problems, you just need to watch out for condensation when you take it out of its cool, dry place into the warm, moist ambient air.

On the other hand, your RF performance might suffer by putting your AP in a big metal box :)

Forced Air Ventillation

[pbox]

1. take the drill to the top of the case. Make a 60 or 80 mm diameter hole.

2. Get a cheap 60 or 80 mm computer fan ($3 investment).

3. Mount with 2 or 4 screws to the top of the case.

4/a (some geekness, but mobile) Take your multimeter (everyone should have one lying around) and find a 5-12 V power to supply the fan. This should be not that hard for any geek. Look around the power supply. Solder fan wires.

4/b (less elegant, but no need to know EE) Take an old PC power supply, hardwire the ATX power signal. Connect fan.

5. Profit. I mean surf.

Try the Netgear ME-102

[raju1kabir]

Not sure whether this will make you feel any better, but I have a Netgear ME-102 access point and it's never had any heat problems.

I live in Washington DC where the summers get pretty summery. I keep it hanging in an unobscured east-facing window where it gets several hours of direct sunlight per day. It's between the window and the blinds so it also gets the heat reflected back by the blinds. I don't use the A/C in my apartment (prefer the fan), so it's usually about 80 in the shade indoors. The thing's gone through one full summer and what we've had of this one, without a hiccup.